powertips

It isn't always easy to pick the right process because the process ID or process name may not be known or ambiguous. If the process has a window...

Get-Process retrieves all running processes and a wealth of information attached to them. One especially useful property is mainWindowTitle which...

Windows 7 comes with a bunch of modules that are not loaded by default. Use this to see which modules are available: Get-Module -listAvailable For...

Modules in PowerShell v.2 can declare which functions, variables, aliases etc. are public and visible to the caller and which ones are hidden. With...

In PowerShell v.2, all new modules work like libraries and can be loaded using Import-Module to gain access to all public functions, variables,...

In a previous tip, you learned about the new modules in PowerShell v.2, which can be loaded using Import-Module. Once you have loaded a module, it...

In PowerShell v.2, there is a new feature called "module," which is a file with the extension .psm1 and behaves almost exactly like a...

Trap, which has been around since PowerShell v.1, is designed to catch errors and works like this: trap { Write-Host -foregroundcolor Yellow `...

As PowerShell v.2 becomes more common , you may want to check which PowerShell version a machine is running. Use this to differentiate between v.1...

As PowerShell becomes more important, you may want to automatically check whether it is available on a machine. To determine whether any PowerShell...

In the previous tip, you used a hash table to translate input values. However, unlike Switch-statements, Hash Tables have no "default" so...

You may have already used Switch to translate input and output values like this: function Get-Name($number) { switch ($number) { 1 { "One"...

You probably know that the Switch statement checks against a value and returns whatever you have defined for this condition like so: function...

There is scripting expertise built-in to PowerShell v.2 that can be activated like this: set-strictmode -version 1set-strictmode -version 2 Use the...

If you'd like to determine a system's uptime, you should use WMI and convert the WMI date into a more readable format: function...

Up for some fun with your prompt? Make it a bit shorter, display the minutes (or hours) you have been working so far, and show the current path in...

Each process stores its start time, so it is fairly easy to find out when the process was launched. If you'd like to know when you started your...

If you ever want to access the process that is executing your current PowerShell session, use the $pid automatic variable which tells you the...

In a previous tip, we have added a new script method to a string called Words() which would split the string into words. But is it worth the effort?...

In a previous tip, you learned how to add custom properties to objects. Today, we want to show you how to add custom methods and also give an...

You may have heard that PowerShell can add custom properties to objects. While we are not going into much detail about this here, we'd like to...

In a previous tip, you learned that CSV files use different separators, depending on your culture. While you were unable to select a separator in...

In PowerShell V1, creating CSVs wasn't very flexible because PowerShell was limited to the comma as separator. In many cultures, different...

In the previous tip, you learned that Export/Import-CSV does not persist property types. Instead, all properties are converted to string. To...

Export-CSV and Import-CSV are great ways of persisting data in a structured way. There are some limitations, though. Take a look. This line saves a...

If you start experimenting with PowerShell V2 ISE (editor), you may notice that all scripts you create are saved in Unicode by default. This was...

Alias names are shortcuts for other commands, and you probably know that. In PowerShell V1, the only way to retrieve all aliases for a given target...

You can run classic cmd commands from within PowerShell and store the results in variables. All you need to do is invoke cmd.exe with the /c switch...

Since both PowerShell and the classic cmd.exe are console-based, it is very easy to switch between both of them. If you must use a classic shell...

Moving the cursor in long input lines is not very convenient. You cannot use the mouse and have to use arrow keys to move backwards and forward....